


A Heart Suspended

by Carmarthen



Category: Chinese History RPF, Hújiā Shíbā Pāi | Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute
Genre: 2nd Century CE, 3rd Century CE, Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eastern Hàn Dynasty, Exile, Gen, Homesickness, Southern Xiōngnú, Three Kingdoms Period
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 21:38:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3149360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmarthen/pseuds/Carmarthen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In autumn, long before envoys come from Han lands to ransom Cai Wenji, her barbarian husband Liu Bao dies, leaving Wenji with a difficult choice: to walk a path quite unlike the one she took in our world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Heart Suspended

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sath/gifts).



> Promptfic for sath, who requested an AU where Liu Bao dies and Cai Wenji becomes the new warlord of the Xiongnu.
> 
> As with my previous story about Cai Wenji, I used Wenji because that is the name by which she is best known now, rather than her style name of the time, Zhaoji, or her birth name, Yan. The research was cursory because this was promptfic and I didn't (and don’t) have access to many resources at the moment, and it's hard to say how truly plausible the premise is in a historical context. Since we know little about the Xiongnu, I’ve extrapolated somewhat from other nomadic cultures. I probably fucked up both the geography and the timeline.

In early autumn, when the grass of the steppes had long turned to dull brown and the cranes had begun their whistling flight south to Han lands for the winter, Liu Bao died.

Wenji did not remember much of the day she received the news: it was all swallowed up in a vast rushing numbness, his other wives and concubines keening and wailing as if at a great distance, and Liu Bao’s sister Huyan holding her hands and explaining, with a quiet urgency Wenji had never heard before, that she did not have time to mourn.

Did she mourn her barbarian husband?

_Would_ she have mourned him, if she had not had sons to think of, sons of her body?

* * *

Liu Bao had enemies, Huyan explained to her, when they rode out from camp on the ugly little barbarian ponies, enemies who would see his sons not as children but as threats, his first wife not as a harmless widow but as a path to power.

She must not remarry, Huyan told her; she must be strong for her sons. Not strong like a Han woman, quietly bending like the willow in the wind, but strong as the nomad women were. She must seize power and hold it until Qubei was a man.

Something in Wenji still recoiled in distaste, but she thought of Qubei, so proud of his new horse, still so far from manhood, and she knew what she had to do.

_(If she were strong like a nomad woman, she could ride away, southward, away from the empty ache of the sky and the endless chatter of barbarian tongues. Away from her sons. But a nomad woman would not leave her children.)_

* * *

When the Han envoy came, it was to a rich people with sleek horses and fat sheep, bright new felt appliqued to their tent-bands, with crimson silk coats for the men and gold and pearls on the women’s headdresses.

_Honored king, Chancellor Cao Cao wishes to ransom Cai Wenji,_ they said, addressing their words to the stocky youth seated at the center of the tent. They did not think worthy of notice the woman beside him, clad in barbarian robes, a sheaf of arrows at her hip, her hair braided with gold and her skin burned brown by sun and wind.

He looked to her, not as the chanyu looks to a trusted advisor but as a son to a mother, and in the Xiongnu tongue, she said,

_Cai Wenji is dead._

If later, in the largest and finest tent in the camp, she wept for what she had lost, no one would disturb the privacy of the war leader of the Xiongnu.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a paraphrase from a translation of stanza 15, where Wenji is torn about having to leave her children: 
> 
> _My body returns to my country, neither child can come along,  
>  My heart is suspended, as if starved forever._


End file.
